Abstract
This study establishes the use of the Earth Observation Data for Ecosystem Monitoring (EODESM) to generate land cover and change classifications based on the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) Land Cover Classification System (LCCS) and environmental variables (EVs) available within, or accessible from, Geoscience Australia’s (GA) Digital Earth Australia (DEA). Classifications representing the LCCS Level 3 taxonomy (8 categories representing semi-(natural) and/or cultivated/managed vegetation or natural or artificial bare or water bodies) were generated for two time periods and across four test sites located in the Australian states of Queensland and New South Wales. This was achieved by progressively and hierarchically combining existing time-static layers relating to (a) the extent of artificial surfaces (urban, water) and agriculture and (b) annual summaries of EVs relating to the extent of vegetation (fractional cover) and water (hydroperiod, intertidal area, mangroves) generated through DEA. More detailed classifications that integrated information on, for example, forest structure (based on vegetation cover (%) and height (m); time-static for 2009) and hydroperiod (months), were subsequently produced for each time-step. The overall accuracies of the land cover classifications were dependent upon those reported for the individual input layers, with these ranging from 80% (for cultivated, urban and artificial water) to over 95% (for hydroperiod and fractional cover). The changes identified include mangrove dieback in the southeastern Gulf of Carpentaria and reduced dam water levels and an associated expansion of vegetation in Lake Ross, Burdekin. The extent of detected changes corresponded with those observed using time-series of RapidEye data (2014 to 2016; for the Gulf of Carpentaria) and Google Earth imagery (2009–2016 for Lake Ross). This use case demonstrates the capacity and a conceptual framework to implement EODESM within DEA and provides countries using the Open Data Cube (ODC) environment with the opportunity to routinely generate land cover maps from Landsat or Sentinel-1/2 data, at least annually, using a consistent and internationally recognised taxonomy.
Highlights
To date, there have been few land cover maps that provide consistent coverage for all of Australia.Those that exist have mostly focused on only part of the land cover classification spectrum
In late 2015, a substantive dieback of mangroves occurred along the coastline of the Gulf of Carpentaria, with this attributed to a combination of a substantive drop (20–30 cm) in sea level, highLand temperatures and low rainfall [22]
The Earth Observation Data for Ecosystem Monitoring (EODESM) land cover classification procedure was applied to the four study areas, for time margin, but there was some evidence of dieback several years earlier (2012) within mangroves periods t1 and t2, with these being 2009 and 2016, respectively, for Townsville–Ayr, Diamantina and dominated by Rhizophora stylosa on the landward margin
Summary
There have been few land cover maps that provide consistent coverage for all of Australia. Those that exist have mostly focused on only part of the land cover classification spectrum. As with most Australian land cover mapping systems, NVIS is a combination of inputs from separate mapping efforts by governments at the state and national levels, resulting in an output that has detailed content in some areas but not in others. More detail can be provided through what is known as the Level 4 classification These resulting descriptors (such as canopy cover or leaf type) are combined to produce a cumulated land cover class
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